A common "environmentalist" deception is this one:

The cleanest societies in the world are actually the non-industrial ones -- most of South America and Africa, for example. Where industry rises, pollution fills the air, water and land.

It is completely untrue to say pre-industrial peoples are "clean" -- they have a much larger environmental footprint per person. Primitive peoples do untold amounts of damage to the environment through slash-'n'-burn agriculture, incredibly wasteful hunting practices, and other inefficient uses of resources.

Since there is plenty of evidence for what I say (see link above, for example), why do "environmentalists" tell you this?

They say such things not because they are true (for they are not) but because such beliefs are first a tenant of their religion. The "environmentalist" belief that primitive peoples are "better" is a religious dogma (Michael Crichton might say it is an atheist's replacement for the Garden of Eden story) which harkens back to Rousseau's idea of the "Noble Savage." (Decried here.)

Just as Rousseau adopted the belief because he was alienated from his own society, so also with the contemporary "environmentalist": whether she is attracted to "environmentalism" because of her own pre-existing nihilism, or whether she was taught nihilism by exploiting her concern for our environment, the end result is the same: a person who has a profound hatred for their own place, people, and time.

Even the premises of this idea are deeply misguided: Primitive peoples have no less history than others. And while it is unclear what states they formerly attained (most have higher levels of civilization in their history), one thing is clear: they are living in primitive conditions today because their beliefs and practices are unsuccessful at improving their condition.

So we have this absurdity: Westerners, who pretend primitive peoples are the best (though they don't believe it, or they would shed their clothes and move to the jungles of Thailand, or at least the huts of India) try to get us to emulate and adopt their ideas and methods -- when it is those exact ideas and methods which kept them poor, and living in primitive (and ecologically inefficient) conditions in the first place.

Wealth didn't just drop from the sky on Western civilization, ladies and gentlemen. It wasn't some rare metal which occured only beneath European topsoil. No, it was a combination of ideas -- specificly those arising in Judaism, Christianity, tempered by the Enlightenment and the Reformation -- which created the very environment under which modern innovation and scientific exploration were even thinkable. (Stanley Jaki, for example, points out that a cyclical model of the universe -- present in many Eastern religions (whose tenants New Agers recommend for our society's 'progress') -- denies even the possibility of progress -- one must always end up where one started.)

And, speaking of India and the East, we have this recent article about the "Asian Brown Cloud" largely ignored by Western "environmentalists" and our press:

The major source of potentially climate-changing soot in the air over south Asia is home cooking fires, according to a team of Indian and American researchers.

The burning of wood, agricultural waste and animal manure for cooking is the largest source of black carbon in the air in that region, according to the team led by C. Venkataraman of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

"We therefore suggest that the control of these emissions through cleaner cooking technologies, in addition to reducing health risks to several hundred million users, could be of crucial importance to climate change mitigation in south Asia," the researchers wrote in a paper appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The effect of soot in the air over the Indian Ocean is some 10 times that of the so-called greenhouse gases, according to the researchers. The pollution causes the air to absorb more sunlight, warming the atmosphere and cooling the surface beneath....

They calculated that, of the black soot in the atmosphere, 42 percent originates from cooking fires, 25 percent from burning fossil fuels and 13 percent from open burning such as forest fires.

It should be clear to the reader that the reason I believe such a huge meterological and environmental phemonenon can be completely invisible to the eyes of Western "environmentalists" (and their media allies) is that it does not fit their pre-concevied notions regarding the glories and sustainability of primitive life.

To the extent the environment presents a problem, it is clear that problem will be solved by moving forward technologically and economically (as the article suggests), and not backwards.

One final comment: Observant readers will note my use of quotes around the word "environmentalist". Why?

It is impossible to solve a problem by lying about it or misrepresenting it. If you are not honest about its severity, causes, and cures, any actions you recommend will be similarly flawed, and will likely make things worse, not improve them.

(If a man has a cold, we do him no good to tell him he has cancer. Nor vise-versa.)

Likewise, I am persuaded that the current level of dishonesty among activist "environmentalists" and their media allies almost certainly ensures they will (a) actually fail to improve the environment (and even do more harm to it), and (b) create a lot of unnecessary human suffering in their misbegotten attempts to do so.

Further Reading

"Environmentalism", as I say, is a religion. Modern secular Westerners are often taught that religions are powerless. To the contrary, they are powerful, and reshape whole societies. If you want to understand a religion's ultimate impact, look to a region which has embraced those ideas for a long time, and see what effect they had. One interesting study of this idea is When the New Age Gets Old [pdf] by Vishal Mangalwadi. As "environmentalism" is becoming increasingly Eastern in character, the ideas presented there are more relevant than ever.